simple thinking for complex software

All Hail the Innovators: 2 Shining Examples of Lateral Thinking

Wonderful things happen when smart people discard limitations that
everyone else has been taking for granted, and two recent examples in
the online world illustrate this beautifully.

Distributed version control

For years we assumed that working together on carefully versioned sets
of files requires a central server to keep everyone on the same
track. Then along came arch, darcs, mercurial, bazaar, git and others
– now it seems like a god-given right that every developer should be
able to independently commit his source code changes and create
branches, and the “central repository” has changed from a technical
necessity to a useful convention.

SEOmoz’s Linkscape

It seems like every notable search engine optimisation blog or site
you’ll find on the web offers home-spun tools for analysing link
graphs, site values, click prices and suchlike. Many of these tools
compile information desperately scraped from Yahoo’s SiteExplorer and
other sources, because the data that everyone really wants is locked
up in Google’s enormous index.

In a stroke of utter genius, the SEO consultancy and community
SEOmoz took venture capital, and then several
months later popped up with
its own index of 30 billion web pages,
opening the way for deep SEO analysis that has been impossible up to
now.

Talk about thinking big.

Innovators, I salute you!

I find it thrilling to see these kinds of innovations, and it’s a
reminder to routinely step back from the problem in front of me, and
see if I’m taking for granted a constraint that isn’t really there.